Gareth O'Callaghan: There's no such thing as a perfect father — and Father's Day is complicated

Father’s Day is make believe, nothing else. Becoming a father takes an entire lifetime, and then some, writes Gareth O'Callaghan 

Gareth O'Callaghan and his father Joe. Even though it’s been eight years since he sat in his favourite chair at the head of the kitchen table, I still find myself asking him questions.

Happy Father’s Day. I mentioned here last week that nothing in life worth having comes easy. Those words were at the heart of everything my father believed in throughout his life. Call it an inherent value — one that he passed to me.

Father’s Day also happens to fall this year on the longest day — as, no doubt, it will be for many fathers for different personal reasons. It’s a day that plays hard on emotions and memories that are often ignored at all costs on other days.

Ever since hearing the first radio commercial weeks ago urging us to consider how important this one day out of an entire year is for your dad (daddy, da, pops, pappa, old boy, old man — whatever you’re endeared to) it’s been impossible to avoid the hype.

That’s if you’re blessed to still have your dad. Mine passed away at the grand age of 89 eight years ago. Even though it’s been that long since he sat in his favourite chair at the head of the kitchen table, I still find myself asking him questions.

Does he answer me? At times I like to think he does in some sort of sensory way, which is comforting.

Father’s Day is meant to be a celebration, but for many people it’s complicated. And that doesn’t ease. If anything, it gets more difficult. Grief is so often at the heart of this celebration, and it’s a unique type of sadness.

For many, the day represents unfinished business. Absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder; if anything, it intensifies the loss that’s just about manageable across the rest of the year.

Maybe what makes Father’s Day so unusual and so different to other celebrations lies in its lack of impact, unlike Mother’s Day. 

Father’s Day is make believe, nothing else. It’s an opportunity to pretend that dads are more exceptional than they are. And there’s nothing wrong with that if you want to play along. Real dads are flawed, and they’re even more real if they can admit it. 

I am a father, but I am far from perfect. I am a work in progress, even at this stage in my life.

Good dads aren’t moulded, and they struggle with the expectations that come with the job spec. Being human is a challenge at the best of times, but being superhuman through the years to those who are your unconditional responsibility and moral priority in every way for almost two decades requires skills that no one has perfected yet. And it’s unlikely they ever will.

I say good dads, because there are also bad ones; lots of them — lousy lazy useless fathers who spend a lifetime avoiding their obligation. The good ones are the guys who try their hardest. They don’t cross the finish line first. The idea is to commit to finishing the race.

Did my father teach me much about being a parent? I think he did; but the challenge of raising children is nothing less than an objective work in progress that every dad learns to grow into. Becoming a father takes an entire lifetime, and then some.

Being a father is a complicated journey — one that mostly goes unspoken, because the mother, in most cases, is the matriarch of the household and the governess of children’s affairs. 

I can’t speak for gay couples who parent, obviously.

Dads often get squeezed out of the parental focus through no fault of their own. You probably won’t read that in the gazillion books written about perfect parenting, but it’s true. 

And what about those fathers who are no longer part of the traditional family unit? Grieving a parent who is still alive is real grief, even if very few people speak about it. It can be more severe than the loss of a parent who has died. You can only grieve someone if you love them. And love is a river that runs both ways, but yet the grief for that parent stays unspoken.

There’s no such thing as a perfect father. It’s taken a lifetime to realise that. You learn as you struggle to cope throughout a life that guarantees nothing except uncertainty.

Aiming to be a perfect father is to create standards that are impossible to meet. Without mistakes there would be nothing to learn. Us men don’t have a clue what we are undertaking when we hold a newborn baby. 

Men won’t know the full story of what it means to be a real father, with all its joys and failings — its emotional highs and lows — until they know what their own dads meant to them.

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I really only got to know my father in the later years of his life. And perhaps that was when I finally got to know myself. Our conversations most mornings were no longer about work or world news; more to do with our lives and living with challenges within relationships, and then towards the end his own mortality.

We talked about the afterlife, and whether our beliefs pre-determined our eternal destiny once we said our final goodbyes. I was grateful to have that time with him. Despite our differences over the years, here we were discussing the things that once made us uncomfortable and that we had been reluctant to talk about.

Towards the end we were at our closest, and everyday felt like a father’s day.

In hindsight, we both learned through those long morning chats that resentment towards others is a personal choice that we have to want to carry, and that life is so much more joyful without it. I learned that the conversations we avoid need to be had, and then laid to rest.

Looking back over the eight years he’s been gone, I wonder what life would be like if we hadn’t taken the time to sit down and allowed ourselves the space to get to know each other. Often that’s what it takes. As the Hebrew proverb reminds me, “Say not in grief ‘he is no more’ but live in thankfulness that he was”.

If I learned anything about Father’s Day, it’s more to do with how we’re prepared to overlook imperfection for one day. My father wasn’t perfect, and he often admitted it to me. Neither am I. We’re always learning, he used to say during our chats. Whatever about his imperfections, I loved what he was, and that he was happy to share it with me.

It’s true that I am becoming more like him. I hear his laughter in mine. The tone of his voice in conversation resonates in my own expressions, and that means a lot. It means we’re still connected in some important way, as though he was setting the groundwork for the next stage for both of us.

Getting to know him in the later years made a huge impact on my life. I realised that he had the same misgivings as mine, the same worries and concerns, and the same confusion about the big questions in life. It connected us in a way that we weren’t before, letting go of what no longer mattered and focusing on what did.

Father’s Day is about reaching out, beyond all the imperfection and misgivings.

I often hear people say that all they want is to have their dads back for just one hour. If your father is alive, then set about making that hour happen, and many more, while you have him. 

If you haven’t spoken to him, pick up the phone. For all the fathers days to come when that choice is no longer possible, you might be very glad that you did.